99 min | PG | June 11, 2021 | Netflix
A Shanghai delivery kid finds a magic teapot and the deflated dragon inside owes him three wishes. He wants the rich girl he loved before money pulled her away. It is Aladdin with chopsticks, and it never once pretends otherwise.
Din is a Shanghai food-delivery kid who loves a childhood friend now lifted into wealth and out of his reach. He finds a battered teapot that releases Long, a dragon who grants three wishes. Aladdin built this machine first and Chris Appelhans does not pretend otherwise. The film transplants the lamp to modern China and asks the same question. It wants to know what a poor boy actually wants when he can have anything.
Jimmy Wong voices Din with a guilelessness that keeps the character grounded. He plays Din as a kid who cannot imagine wishing for himself, and that flaw drives the whole story. John Cho voices Long as a deflated cosmic bureaucrat. Cho lands the comedy by underplaying the magic and treating ten thousand years of servitude as a tedious job. Constance Wu voices Din’s mother with a working-parent weariness that the script earns in a handful of small scenes. Aaron Yoo and Jimmy O. Yang chew through their goon dialogue with cartoon menace that the film does not need but enjoys anyway.
Appelhans writes and directs his first feature and builds the visuals around the gap between Din’s cramped apartment and the chrome towers above it. The animation contrasts the wet, lived-in streets with the cold polish of the rich. Long’s transformations push the strongest images, with the dragon’s body uncoiling in gold against flat night skies. The action beats run loud and broad, and the slapstick aims squarely at children. Appelhans stages the quiet conversations between Din and Long with more care than the chases, and those scenes carry the film.
Wish Dragon knows exactly what it is and does not strain to be more. The borrowed structure delivers the beats on schedule and the jokes pitch young. The film works best when it drops the spectacle and lets Din and Long talk about what wealth actually buys. It does not reinvent the wish-fulfillment fable. It tells it cleanly and means every sentiment it reaches for.